Open Machine Translation Core: An Open API for Machine Translation Systems

Open Machine Translation Core (OMTC) is a proposed open API that defines an application programming interface (API) for machine translation (MT) systems. The API defined is a service interface which can be used to underpin any type of MT application. It consists of components which allow programmers, with little effort, to integrate different MT back-ends into their applications since an OMTC compliant MT system presents a consistent interface. OMTC attempts to standardise the following aspects of an MT system: resources – the abstract representation of assets used e.g. documents and translation memories, sessions – a period of time in which a user interacts with the system, session negotiation – agreement on which services are to be provided, authorisation – integration with third party authorisation systems to prevent users performing unauthorised actions, scheduling – the management of long running MT tasks, machine translation engines – a representation of an entity capable of providing only MT, and translators – a conglomeration of, at least one of the following, an MT engine, a collection of translation memories, and a collection of glossaries.